U.S. EPA and Unilever Announce Major New Research Collaboration to
Advance Non-Animal Approaches for Chemical Risk Assessment

Research collaboration will develop ground-breaking scientific
approaches to better assess the safety of chemicals found in some
consumer products without using animal data

September 08, 2015 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Unilever announce a
research collaboration to develop ground-breaking scientific approaches
to better assess the safety of chemicals found in some consumer products
without using animal data.

The alternative and cutting-edge approaches, which EPA and Unilever are
developing, represent the first steps in a paradigm shift for chemical
safety testing and risk assessment by making them faster, cheaper, and
more relevant to humans. These new tools will provide a robust
scientific basis for assessing and managing chemical safety and
efficiently quantifying human health risks for thousands of chemicals.

EPA and Unilever will develop a series of case studies based on
chemicals of mutual interest. EPA will develop and provide data using
these automated chemical screening technologies. Unilever will use its
longstanding expertise in consumer products to estimate exposures for
the chemicals. Together, the EPA and Unilever will work to combine the
information into a risk assessment. The collaboration will help inform
how EPA’s ToxCast project can be used by private and public entities as
well as in the development of chemical risk assessments.

Unilever is contributing over $800,000 and considerable scientific
expertise to help generate and integrate new exposure data to develop a
model approach for high throughput risk assessments that include both
hazard and exposure predictions. The Unilever initiative comes from its
Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre which, as it celebrates its 25th
year of existence in 2015, sees this research area of non-animal
approaches as being one of the enduring ‘big scientific challenges’ that
has shaped its evolution over the past quarter of a century (see: www.tt21c.org).

Julia Fentem, Vice President of Unilever’s Safety and Environmental
Assurance Centre, said, “This research collaboration is strategically
very important for Unilever’s long-held ambition to eliminate the need
for any animal testing while also continuing to ensure the safety of
consumers and our environment. If we had robust scientific tools to
accurately and rapidly predict exposures to chemicals at the cellular
and molecular levels within the human body, this would be a huge step
forward in being able to conduct safety risk assessments without using
animal data.”

The collaboration will use data from EPA’s ToxCast program and the
affiliated Tox21 consortium, which is a collaboration among EPA, the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA). These programs use automated chemical screening technologies to
rapidly and efficiently test thousands of chemicals for their effects on
human cells or cellular components that are critical to normal function.
Data from these technologies are then incorporated into computational
models to predict potential adverse health effects and estimate the
amount of chemical that may cause these effects.

The new collaboration aims to incorporate elements that have been
previously missing from the automated chemical screening approach such
as tools for incorporating metabolism of the test chemicals and a more
comprehensive evaluation of the human biological pathways that can be
affected.

“If successful, research from this collaboration will result in better
ways to evaluate the potential human health effects of new ingredients
and chemicals we currently know little about,” said Dr. Russell Thomas,
Director of EPA's National Center for Computational Toxicology. “These
methods could be used by both industry and governmental agencies to
reduce the costs associated with safety testing and accelerate the pace
of chemical risk assessment.”

About Unilever:

Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of Food, Home and
Personal Care products with sales in over 190 countries and reaching 2
billion consumers a day. It has 172,000 employees and generated sales of
€48.4 billion in 2014. Over half (57%) of the company’s footprint is in
developing and emerging markets. Unilever has more than 400 brands found
in homes around the world, including Persil, Dove, Knorr, Domestos,
Hellmann’s, Lipton, Wall’s, PG Tips, Ben & Jerry’s, Marmite, Magnum and
Lynx.

Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) commits to:

Decoupling growth from environmental impact.

Helping more than a billion people take action to improve their health
and well-being.

Enhancing the livelihoods of millions of people by 2020.

Unilever was ranked number one in its sector in the 2014 Dow Jones
Sustainability Index. In the FTSE4Good Index, it achieved the highest
environmental score of 5. It led the list of Global Corporate
Sustainability Leaders in the 2014 GlobeScan/SustainAbility annual
survey for the fourth year running, and in 2015 was ranked the most
sustainable food and beverage company in Oxfam’s Behind the Brands
Scorecard.

Unilever has been named in LinkedIn’s Top 3 most sought-after employers
across all sectors.

EPA’s safer chemicals research conducts cutting-edge science to address
the impacts of existing chemicals, anticipate impacts of new chemicals,
and evaluate complex interactions of chemical and biological systems to
better protect human health and the environment. For more information
visit - http://www2.epa.gov/chemical-research.